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The engines really don’t care about us, humans, who have to play a position that they happily evaluate as equal. Feed it a symmetrical position with equal material and no apparent weaknesses and it will tell you it is “just equal,” sometimes even a “dead draw.”

One of the most troubling decisions is to design your opening repertoire. The idea of having a perfect set of weapons against each of the opponent’s possible choices gives us peace of mind. However, there is a huge gap between how we picture this in our head and how it actually works in practice.

We see openings (our repertoire) as something fixed where ideally we would obtain a comfortable position each time and sometimes if we are lucky, we can get even an advantage. I would say that nowadays this rather sounds like wishful thinking and not very practical.

Lev Polugaevsky was one of those Grandmasters from a generation of great players who left a mark in the chess world. A player with a unique style, one mostly positional but also aggressive when given the opportunity, his games are truly a delight to study and represent a never-ending source of learning. His first international success came in the early 60s when he won the Mar del Plata tournament obtaining this way the Grandmaster title. Later, the “great Poluga” won the URSS in 1967 and 1968 and finished third in 1969.

Symmetrical positions can be tricky and difficult to evaluate. At first sight they may look equal – after all, there are no visible differences between the two sides – and less experienced players are tempted to think that a draw will be easy to achieve.

While a draw is likely to happen in a game between two strong players, it is also often that we see experienced players scoring great results in this type of positions.

In this post, I would like to show a very simple, yet a very effective principle that is present in every game of chess.

While our opponent’s moves are providing vital information about their intentions, still we often fail to understand them in their entirety. By entirety, I mean not only understanding their intention, but also their drawbacks.

Positions with the isolated pawn are often misunderstood, which many times leads to the fear of playing this type of positions. The common concept is that the isolated pawn is a weakness (and it is!) and we know that we should avoid creating weaknesses in our position. This general idea is correct, but there are no rules in chess, but mostly concepts that should guide our thinking. The case of the isolated pawn is one that enhances this idea. It is a weakness, yes, but it is not so easy to play against it.

After the closing ceremony of European Individual Championship that crowned him a champion, I had a chance to talk with the rising Russian star Vladislav Artemiev.

A humble fellow, but one that knows his talents. He knows he is good, though he also knows he needs to work more if he is to become better. Currently sitting at number 13 in the world his main ambition is to qualify for the Candidates tournament via either the World Cup or the Grand Swiss.

This year has started with rather sad news for the chessplayers all around – Vladimir Kramnik, or Big Vlad, as he has been known for years, one of the classics of our times, has decided to retire from competitive chess. His game and style of play have been an inspiration for many strong and aspiring players and we can only say that this is a big loss for the whole chess community.

However, 2019 seems to be the year of another, rising Vlad – one who has shown great form and beautiful chess – the recently crowned European Champion, Russian Grandmaster Vladislav Artemiev.